Turning Point: The Arab World's Marginalization and International Security After 9/11

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The danger raised by the terrorist threat is real, existential, and vital to the United States. But the attacks on 9/11 have been broadly misunderstood. In assessing the meaning and significance of the war on terror, Tschirgi raises many issues related to the Middle East and American policy toward that area. For example, he debunks the entire exceptionalist approach to the Arab world (the presumption that Arab societies fail to be fathomed by Western social science). While Tschirgi stresses the need for resolving the war on terrorism favorably, he also suggests two broad policy recommendations. First, he argues that while the United States should maintain its firm commitment to Israel's preservation as a Jewish state, it has no corresponding duty to support Israeli expansionism. U.S.-Israeli relations should proceed on this basis and should be informed by a greater American reliance on principles of international law. Second, Tschirgi concludes that an American withdrawal from Iraq must be effected as early as possible. Tschirgi's provocative thesis is that the attacks of 9/11 were not as unique an event as we commonly believe. Rather, they were understandablethough deplorablehuman reactions to a combination of factors that fueled the Arab world's marginalization and led to a generalized feeling among the people of that region that the West (and particularly the United States) posed a mortal threat to their identity. Employing three case studies of marginalized violent conflictMexico's Zapatista conflict, Egypt's struggle against the Gama'a al-Islamiyya in Upper Egypt, and Nigeria's fight against the Ogoni people in the Niger DeltaTschirgi demonstrates the dynamics through which traditional peoples have in modern times opted to wage hopeless struggle against objectively more powerful states. The parallels between the dynamics that informed each of these situations and those marking the international Muslim insurgency against the West are striking, as are the significant differences between the two phenomena. The parallels are found in the mechanics of marginalization and resistance. The differences lie, first, in the Muslim insurgency's identification of the West as a total enemy and the struggle with it as having a zero-sum nature and, second, in the modern terrorists' potential access to lethal means of mass destruction. Both the parallels and differences that mark the two phenomena help deepen a real understanding of the meaning of 9/11.

Reviews

It makes sense to understand the reasoning of those you oppose-even if doing so exposes you to truths about yourself that you do not want to see. Tschirgi rejects simplistic slogans-particularly the idea the Arab world is somehow exceptional, or that 9/11 is a product of an unreasoning hatred of American freedom-and offers a comparative analysis of the conditions underlying asymmetric conflict.The writing is a model of clarity, the arguments are well reasoned, and whatever one thinks of its conclusions, it is a book that deserves a wide audience. Recommended. All readership levels. * Choice *
U.S. policymakers would have done better, Dan Tschirgi asserts to recognize a peculiar form of 'asymmetrical war' that characterizes the contemporary world (p.70). This kind of warfare, the topic of the second essay, includes the Zapatista uprising (chapter 3), the activities of the Islamic group al-Jama'ah al-Istalmiyyah (chapter4), and the emergence of the Ogoni movement (chapter 5). Each of these conflicts erupted out of widespread frustration engendered by the impact of globalization on peripheral and thereby disadvantaged locales: Chiapas, Upper Egypt, and the Niger River delta, respectively. The primary 'lesson' of these episodes is that 'chronic marginalization can eventually promote the option of launching an asymmetrical conflict against all odds, and that possibilities of such a decision increase when the insurrectionary ideology is linked to a worldview that sees empirical reality as subordinate to the dictates of a higher transcendental reality' (p.115). * Political Science Quarterly *

Author Bio

Dan Tschirgi is Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of The Politics of Indecision: Origins and Implications of American Involvement with the Palestine Problem (Praeger, 1983), The American Search for Mideast Peace (Praeger, 1989), and (with Ann Lesch) Origins and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Greenwood, 1998).